1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to financial transaction systems, and in particular, to method for electronically integrating and delivering a plurality of global financial services to customers.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Businesses, particularly large corporations, use a variety of financial services provided by financial institutions, including banks. For example, a typical business may require financial products and services of several types, including payments, cash management, securities, trade finance, custody, foreign exchange, and loans, to support its day-to-day operations.
Each of these products and services has many different subcategories. For example, cash management services include funds transfers, money market transactions, stop payment orders, and account balance and activity inquiries. Securities services include securities trading, and services to investors and issuers of securities. Trade finance services include letters of credit, money collection for trade transactions, and trade activity and payment inquiries.
Over the last decade, a number of electronic delivery systems were provided to enable corporate customers to initiate banking transactions and retrieve information from terminals located on the customer's premises. Due to limitations in technology, these access services were typically unique to each product or geographic region. This usually meant that neither the bank nor its customers could directly receive a consolidated picture of the customer's global business and financial relationships.
Prior to the present invention, electronic delivery systems were available on a global basis only through a large number of separate electronic delivery systems located around the world. For example, the largest U.S. bank, Citibank, currently has many separate electronic delivery systems in the United States to provide its corporate customers with cash management, securities, and trade services. These separate electronic delivery systems cover only the United States region.
To engage in overseas financial activities, it was necessary for a customer to communicate with processing systems in remote geographic regions using separate electronic delivery systems. For example, Citibank has electronic delivery systems for accounts in Latin America that provide cash management and securities services for the Latin America region. In Europe, Citibank has electronic delivery systems that provide cash management and securities services throughout the European countries. And in the Asia-Pacific region, Citibank has electronic delivery systems that provide cash management, securities, and trade services to that region. Many other electronic delivery systems exist throughout other geographic regions of the world that offer some or all of the financial services needed to support international business operations in those regions.
Communicating using a large number of different electronic delivery systems throughout the world to engage in global finance activities has significant disadvantages. The processing systems in other countries often operate only during normal working hours in the local region. Thus, for example, a U.S. business making a funds transfer from its bank account in Asia might be required to connect to the appropriate processing system in the Asia-Pacific region outside normal working hours in the United States to make the transaction.
Businesses were also required to select and access a particular electronic delivery system to make a given transaction or inquiry, depending on the geographic region involved and the type of transaction or inquiry. This placed a significant logistical burden on those businesses and made global banking less attractive to many customers.
In addition, businesses that required access to multiple financial products (i.e., cash-securities, cash-trade, or cash-securities-trade) or to multiple geographies had to have multiple delivery systems for the separate products. This was burdensome for the customer as it required different sign-on sequences, passwords, training, and hardware platforms.